New Resource: Facebook Guide for MilFams

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21 Dec 2011By Amy Bushatz

A new guide compiled by a military family support organization and Facebook can help spouses learn how to best use social media tools while navigating the ever sticky issues of operational and personal security.

The Social Media Guide for Military Families (downloadable here ... see note at bottom of post) was put together by Blue Star Families and is chock-full of Facebook tips, links and aids, including ideas and instructions for how to edit your security settings in your account and keep people you don’t know from viewing your info.

Raise your hand if you’ve never been confused by privacy settings on Facebook. Uh-huh, that’s what I thought.

I found the privacy setting information and ideas for different DoD groups to “friend” to be very helpful. But the most important thing here, in my mind, is the operational security (OPSEC) tips. And here’s why:

Yesterday I spent about 30 minutes reading through my newly available Facebook timeline. (I’m sentimental, what can I say). I lingered over my status messages from our 2009 deployment a particularly long time. Since then I’ve developed a glorious history of telling people to be careful of OPSEC, and thought I was pretty careful with it at the time. And so it was somewhat surprising and, frankly, embarrassing for me yesterday when I realized how terribly over that deployment I had violated so many of the common sense rules we have been told to follow.

I pulled this handy OPSEC chart from the guide. How many times have we violated this stuff without thinking?

Common Misconceptions: Reality:

I encourage you to check out the whole guide here and enjoy and use this great resource!

EDIT: The link to the guide originally included in this post stopped working and started directing people to some sort of foreign language documents. When I originally included it, it did, in fact, lead to the guide as it was the link I used to get the info for this post. I don't know what changed, but the situation has been fixed and the link should now be working correctly. Thanks to those who pointed out this problem.